


I Won't Let Go

by Bus_Kids_Burgade (Inthemorninglight)



Series: I Won't Let Go [1]
Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: 4722 Hours AU, Gen, Jemma being bamf on Maveth by herself, Kid Fic, no Will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-24
Updated: 2016-11-24
Packaged: 2018-09-01 21:34:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8638894
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Inthemorninglight/pseuds/Bus_Kids_Burgade
Summary: A 4,722 hours AU in which instead of finding Will Daniels, rugged astronaut, Jemma finds Cody Daniels, a little boy born and raised entirely on Maveth and now just as alone as she is.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Hello folks :) This is something of an abridged fic, a little too comprehensive to be a bullet fic, but not quite fully-fledged. It's the first part in a universe that will hopefully be populated with one-shots and ficlets, but here's the jumping-off point, an explanation of the cannon divergent events.

About a month into her exile on Maveth, Jemma discovers that she is not, in fact, the only human on this planet.

 

It is hard to tell how old Cody Daniels is. She thinks he’s about eight or nine, but even he has no idea, without any way to track the passage of earth time. He is the son of the last two surviving astronauts of a doomed NASA mission sent through the portal in 2001, born here several years after their arrival.

 

Jemma doesn’t know what happened to the NASA team, but by the time she meets Cody he’s alone. He’s wild at first. His hair’s matted and tangled and falling over wide, pale eyes. Every inch of him is covered in filth and he will not speak or look at her, scampers barefoot over the sand, tries to snatch food or some of the meager possessions she has when she isn’t watching.

 

Yet no child so young could have survived very long in this place by himself. Someone has cut his hair in the last year, has sewn together scraps of clothing to fit his small body, has taken the time to give him reading lessons if the scrawls she notices on the walls of his cave-like home are an indication. Where his parents are now and how long they’ve been gone is a mystery, but they definitely aren’t here now.

 

Their relationship is slow to start. Cody keeps his distance, watching her always with a wary, mistrustful gaze. He only allows her down into the cavern where he lives and sleeps a couple times and brandishes a homemade weapon whenever she gets too close. She keeps sleeping outside in her little camp by the water. But Cody comes, both for water and because he’s entranced by her phone. And eventually he starts asking her questions.

 

The tipping point is the sandstorm. Jemma has weathered a few vicious winds by now, winds that throw grains of sand like a thousand biting knives into her face and snatch at her breath, but none as fierce is as this. This is a true storm. She thinks about banging on the hatch and shouting for Cody to let her in, but this will no doubt terrify him, so she resigns herself to taking shelter behind the largest boulder she can find and waiting it out.

 

But Cody finds her. Somehow – and she cannot imagine how as the force of the gale knocks his tiny frame around violently – he finds her. Without a word he drags her, yanking and scratching and kicking when she stops or is too slow, back to the hatch, and when they are both safely out of the storm, he curls up in a ball in the corner, arms over his head and shaking hard.

 

Because he’s never liked her too close, she stays at the other end of the room and listens to the howl of the wind. But she has never seen him so terrified and it is hard to watch. Very slowly, she edges closer to him until she is right beside him, and winds an arm around his shoulders. At once, he is in her lap, face smashed into her neck, arms so tight it’s almost hard to breathe. They stay like that until the storm is over, and after that everything is different.

 

Jemma moves into the cavern and Cody teaches her where to find food, where dangerous canyons and sinkholes are, whatever he knows about surviving here. She cleans him up, washes his clothes and combs his hair, tends some of the nastier scrapes he’s accumulated from the rough terrain, lets him play with her phone. Then she sees the computer equipment.

 

Using maps of the stars and notes the astronauts had made, and using her phone to power the computers, Jemma spends months working on a way home.

 

Cody, as it turns out, can talk quite a bit when he wants to, although it takes him a little while to get used to her presence. It also turns out that he’s very smart. His mother was a geologist, his father practically a physicist, and the cavern is covered in periodic tables and diagrams and graphs. He watches Jemma’s every move intently, asking question after question about the computers and what she’s doing, crawling over her lap and climbing on her shoulders to get a better look at what she’s seeing.

 

She takes to calling him Monkey, because at first he was always trying to take her things, scrambling over the sand dunes on all fours and climbing rocks like a little monkey, and now he climbs all over her like she’s a tree and sticks his nose into everything like Curious George. And the name reminds her of Fitz and makes her smile.  
As she reads the journals, notes, and comments in the margins of maps the scientists left behind, the small NASA team starts to become real to her. She feels she is getting to know each of them, like she can hear Will Daniels and Laurie Austin and all the rest’s voices in their distinct handwriting, as though this group of brilliant minds are ghosts, spirits guiding her home. 

 

It almost works. It’s so close to working. She’s calculated the exact time and location of the next portal opening. She’s written detailed instructions to help the others find them. But the bottle falls just short of the opening.

 

It almost destroys her. She might have jumped into the canyon there and then if Cody hadn’t been watching her with big eyes. Instead, she turns and begins the long trek back. It dawns on her as she and Cody fight silently through the wind that this cave is the closest thing she’ll have to a home for the rest of her life, and when they finally get back she loses it. She screams wordless anguish and throws whatever she can find, beats her fists against the walls, does all she can to tear apart the universe that has done this to her. Cody knows nothing else to do but wrap his skinny arms around her waist and hold on.

 

She doesn’t get out of bed for what must be days. She can’t. Cody brings her water, whatever he can scavenge, lies next to her cot and draws on the earthen floor. 

 

“It’s not such a bad place, really,” he tells her. “I lived here my whole life. The sky changes all the time and there’s fungus and cool-looking rocks. And since there’s two of us, we can play hangman and tic-tac-toe.”

 

He looks hopefully at her, but there’s no change in her vacant expression.

 

Eventually, though, she notices that Cody isn’t in the cavern anymore, and that, in fact, he’s been gone for quite a long time. This alarms her enough to wrench herself from the hard-as-stone cot and climb up to the surface to look for him. She’s panicking in earnest when she finally finds him, perched like a gargoyle at the top of one of the higher rocky ridges. 

 

“I’m looking out for the portal,” he explains when she collapses next to him. “You can see forever up here. If I see it open, I can run real fast and get you.”

 

It takes every ounce of energy she has some days, but she manages to scrape herself together and get out of bed because Cody needs her to. She scavenges, makes meals, cleans as best she can, musters smiles and games and jokes. And when the sandstorms come, she holds him tight.

 

Sometimes, during the storms, they sing at the top of their lungs, whatever songs Jemma can remember. Camp songs from when she was a child, pop songs that were on the radio when she was taken, classic rock songs her father always played around the house.

 

Sometimes she tells him stories about her team. The time Skye blasted a whole plane full of evil crystals into the ocean. The time May picked up an Asgardian staff and fought with the wrath of gods. The time Bobbi rescued her from HYDRA.

 

Sometimes he tells her stories about his parents. Whatever he can remember. It’s during one of these storms he tells her the planet is evil. There is a monster out there, he says, and it took his parents. It comes in the storms. It sounds to her like the kind of boogeyman stories a child would come up with in the dark, but it still leaves a cold feeling shivering up her spine. 

 

She has almost grown accustomed to this life. To this battle, really. Every day is a battle. To find enough to eat. To outrun the storms when they catch them too far away from home. To beat the fear that pounds in the back of her throat like a constant companion asking will today be the day we can’t find enough food, eat something poisonous, befall the same fate as the NASA team? And most draining of all is the battle day-in and day-out with the all-consuming grief for her home and each and every one of her family and friends. The letting go of every hope and dream and wish she’s ever had. They get no easier to fight, but at least she is getting used to them. 

 

She scrounges, for Cody’s sake, for things to look forward to. And one such momentous occasion for which they spend days preparing, is the rising of the sun. It will be visible, barely, for only a few hours before it disappears again for another eighteen years. In anticipation, Jemma explains how she calculated the sunrise, teaches Cody about the properties of light and the biological benefits of solar energy (about which he already knows a surprising amount), tells him all the myths she knows about the sun from around the world. They pack a picnic of choice stewed fungi and scraggly plants and head for the best vantage point to wait for the light.  
That, of course, is when they see the flare. 

 

Jemma has never run so hard and fast in all her life. Cody is extremely quick for how small he is, but even he has trouble keeping up with her, and when they reach the edge of the dust storm, he panics. It’s all she can do to stop him bolting in the opposite direction, and she ends up bundling him in her arms as she plunges in toward the flare, and small and light as he is, the awkward bulk of his weight slows her down. 

 

And when they come face-to-face with the figure stalking the heart of the storm, boogeyman that has terrorized his entire life, Jemma is certain they will not make it out. Her arms are full of Cody. She can barely run and she cannot fight. A decision comes to her and she is acting on it almost before she registers what it is.

 

“Run,” she tells Cody, setting him down in the sand. “Run until you find Fitz, as fast as you can and don’t look back.” He’s crying and clutching at her fiercely and she has to wrench him away, She jams her phone into his hands (it’s nothing more than a talisman now but maybe, maybe Fitz will be able to salvage the sim card, have some kind of goodbye from her that he can hold onto) and yells at him to go, but it’s too late, it’s here. 

 

Her only hope is dirty and untested and in all honesty she doesn’t believe it’s going to work, but from her bag she pulls a rudimentary explosive, cobbled together from gunpowder and other scraps salvaged from the moldering NASA equipment. She pitches it as hard as she can at the figure looming in front of them and dives on top of Cody as a burst of light and heat pulses over them. She does not wait to see if it worked, does not look back, just yanks Cody up from the ground and starts at a dead run. For all she knows, It could be inches behind them the whole way.

She hears Fitz screaming her name into the wind and it’s the best sound she’s ever heard. But by the time she gets close enough to see him, he’s already being dragged back into the flickering portal. Jemma lays on the speed, almost tumbling down the steep incline, and when he sees her he redoubles his efforts to fight the force dragging him back. She launches herself at him, Cody’s wrist caught in her ironclad grip, and barely, just barely, do their fingers catch.


End file.
